Fifteen attendees toured NIST Boulder Labs on Monday, June 10, 2019. Highlights of the tour included:
- NIST’s 1980 Emmy Award for the invention of closed captioning
- Steps where President Eisenhower gave speech during the commissioning of NIST Boulder
- NIST-F2 atomic clock, which neither gains nor loses one second in 300 years
- Section member Nate Orloff’s lab for high-frequency dielectric material characterization and microfluidics
- Boulder Microfabrication Facility, a Class-100 clean room, where NIST traceable Programmable Josephson Voltage Standards are made
- Precision Imaging Facility, replete with numerous imaging tools including a He-ion microscope and extreme atom probe tomography
- Molecular Beam Epitaxy Chamber, a high-vacuum machine cluster where GaN nanowires are produced
After the tour, participants enjoyed a social hour with food and beer at a local Boulder brewery. During that time, Section officers Sandrine Ricote, Scott Thompson, Nate Orloff, Bill Long, and Eric Marksz met to plan and discuss future Section business, which included:
- Potential tours and/or events, such as Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, Honeywell, NREL, and Colorado School of Mines
- Sponsorship of an award at EMA or MS&T for students
- Obtaining Materials Science Classroom Kits from ACerS for interactions with local high schools
- Potential for a speaker series at Colorado School of Mines
- Continued collaboration with ASME on occasional joint local meetings including Students in Industry Week
NIST Boulder tour participants
